The inaugural University of Sanctuary lecture by Alison Phipps focuses on the complexities of refugee integration through languages and the arts, emphasizing the importance of solidarity across different contexts. It highlights a research initiative aimed at exploring multilingual practices in conflict situations and promoting representation for those typically marginalized in academic discourse. Ultimately, the lecture calls for creative interventions and new perspectives on resilience, voice, and beauty in the lives of refugees.

1. Broken World, Broken Word
DCU
Inaugural University of Sanctuary Lecture
Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair: Refugee Integration through
Languages and the Arts
University of Glasgow

2. We lost our breath
among the hostile winds
Kofi Anyidoho

3. Fifteen Years of Sanctuary Stories

4. My Name is …..

5. The Beauty & Outrage of our Stories
And yet, it seems to me that something different is
happening when one part of the globe rises in moral
outrage against actions and events that happen in
another part of the globe, a form of moral outrage that
does not depend upon a shared language or a common
life grounded in physical proximity. In such cases, we
are seeing and enacting the very activity of bonds of
solidarity that emerge across space and time.
Judith Butler (2011)

6. 2014
Singing Goodbye to Red
Road

7. Researching Multilingually at the Borders of the
Body, Language, Law, and the State
£2 million (3
years)
11 countries,
22 researchers.
5 case studies / 2
hubs

8. Researching Multilingually: Aims:
• to research interpreting, translation and multilingual practices in
challenging conflict and refugee contexts, and,
• while doing so, to document, describe and evaluate appropriate
research methods (traditional and arts based) and develop theoretical
approaches for this type of academic exploration.
• To up end the ‘normal’ routines of academic representation giving
control and voice to those normally denied representational power as
artists or researchers.

9. Global Mental Health

10. Law

11. EU Borders

12. US Borderlands

13. Gaza

14. Witness-bearing: Calais

15. Decreation
“Intense pain is also
language-destroying: as the
content of one’s world
disintegrates, so that which
would express and project
the self is robbed of its
source and its subject.
Word, self and voice are
lost, or nearly lost.”
(Scarry: 35 )

16. Daffodils

17. (Post) Decolonial Imagination
Academic Hub
Creative Arts Hub
Multimodal, multilingual Creative
Interventions and Interruptions
(translingual practice).
Curation of films, workshops,
methods, poetry, drama, devising,
narratives, story-telling, textiles

18. What are we learning?
“The new world is not given
whole, any more than the
new self is given abruptly in
psychotherapy. It is given
only a little at a time, one
poem, one healing one
pronouncement, one
promise, one
commandment.”
(Brueggemann)

19. Under Duress
Languages disintegrate.
The voice is lost
The voice travels
The voice shapes a new
migratory aesthetic
Stories form, are told &
translate, appearing in
different bodies.

20. Sonic not phonic realm of poetry
Multilingual devising with
idioms of resilience and
well being
‘Powers stored in their
obscure formulations can
be released in
performance’ (Barber)

21. The art of making things stick (Barber)
Multilingual vernaculars,
translingual practice and multiple
translations
Meeting in everyday ceremony,
ritual, performance, language in
highly proverbial forms.
‘Lapidariy fragments that are
fixed.’ (Barber)

22. Beauty; Proximity & Justice
People seem to wish there to be beauty even
when their own self-interest is not served by it;
or perhaps more accurately, people seem to
intuit that their own self-interest is served by
distant peoples’ having the benefit of beauty.
(Scarry 2001)

23. Eritrean Orthodox Church: Calais

24. The Epic Story Goes South

25. Arendt & Agamben: ‘being-in-exodus’
“It is only in a land where
the spaces of state will have
been perforated and
topologically deformed, and
the citizen will have learned
to acknowledge the refugee
that he [sic] himself is, that
man’s political survival today
will be imaginable.”
(Agamben)

26. Languaged Devising
RM Borders: “Broken World Broken Word” June 2016 Workshops

27. Noyam: Broken World, Broken Word:

29. English Last
Intentional
Multilingualism
20 languages
Calabash as Babel.
Clearing a space for
translators/tion to
emerge.

30. Broken World Broken Word
The work has been undertaken through ongoing,
generative relationships between artists, linguists and
researchers and the epic story of exile, war,
persecution, resistance and safety the story has been
told through many different academic and artistic
media.

31. We will not let you pass

32. Always Improvise

33. Idioms of Resilience & Distress

37. “In dark times, will there be singing?”

38. “Yes, there will be singing. About dark
times”
(Brecht)

39. New European Song Book
An international creative collaboration that
celebrates the new music arising from a
continent in flux. Six European countries have
co-produced this unique project. For the United
Kingdom's first song, Ghanaian artist Naa
Densua Tordzro collaborated with Scottish singer
and composer Karine Polwart. Video

41. Researching Multilingually at the Borders of
Language, the Body, Law and the State
Alison.phipps@glasgow.ac.uk
@alison_phipps
http://researching-multilingually-at-borders.com